Asserting ourselves effectively

I22

We had massive demonstrations, for example, against the war in Iraq, massive protests all over the world. Massive protest, [a] vast [number] of people...against the war and yet...the invasion of Iraq [happened anyway]. So there's this institutionalization of protest, so people sit back and say, ‘okay, I get all this anger, and yet I have no power, I'm impotent in terms of affecting policy.’ So once again this raises the issue of how [do we] effectively assert [ourselves?]

Imagining alternatives

I10

It's easy to be angry, and rant, and say the things that you don't agree with but when [do] you take the next step of, okay, how can we build something new? How can we build something better? How can we go forward? That's when the imagination is the most important because the imagination, it allows you to maybe think of something in a way that you've never thought of before.

Imagining the future together

I21

I'm sitting on this side of the river saying ‘I'm happy to cross over with you,’ I don't know what the bridge looks like, but I think we have to sustain this bank of the river so that it doesn't collapse on our way to that one. Because I do not have sufficient radical imagination to know how we're going to get from here to what I imagine for the future, I don't have that. I don't think that gives me an excuse not to keep on keeping on because I think the struggle against slavery in the United States took four hundred years. I've been working for about forty and not consistently….I'm saddened that I don't have the imagination to understand [how] we're going to get from a and b but I think we need to discuss how we're going to get from a to b together because there are smarter people than me.

Dystopia, narcissism, and control mythologies

I5

Dystopia is a control mythology, that's what it is, and it is the mark of a society that is completely narcissistic that imagines that its own ending is equivalent to the ending of the world... Will we face resource shortage? Unquestionably. Will there be difficult choices to be made? Absolutely. Will there be fascism? Yes, almost certainly. Do we maybe need some of that crisis in order to actually generate movement forward? Unfortunately, probably yes.

Prefiguring alternatives, resisting the status quo

I3

We need to organize outside of the current mainstream political structures and create, pre-emptively, alternative ways of organizing and living and generating living, breathing examples of other ways of living. One strategy can't really exist without the other. I think if we organize, if we do our own thing, and yet we completely ignore the mainstream political system and let it turn to fascism then whatever alternative pockets exist might get screwed in the long run and, at the same time, if we just depend on asking [for] reforms of the political system then all we're going to get are scraps all the time and never have any kind of real change before it's too late.

Organize where you are

I27

You have to organize where you are. If you go to high school, you organize high school students, you don't organize pensioners or something. If you're a...pensioner you organize other people who are like you, you organize your friends, you organize. And that's something that's really important, it's building those [struggles] link by link, person by person. So if you're doing environmental organizing...you're bringing a radical perspective that links that struggle to other struggles. People often come into being active or caring about certain things through particular...issues, right? Going through the process of gaining a political consciousness...usually centers around one thing and then hopefully there's people there who can make links between that one thing and a broader perspective of capitalism, a broader perspective of a whole range of things.

Leadership and revolution

I23

...a belief in intrinsic spontaneity of the masses to be revolutionary without hard, slogging leadership….[is a] disease...

Hope and fear for the future

I10

I draw a lot of my inspiration, especially when it comes to environmental activism, from the compassion that I have for the planet, from the emotional connection that I've built to the earth through many excursions, and wilderness trips, and exploring in nature, and the huge amount of appreciation I have for the world around me. So yeah, compassion, that is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from and also a little bit of fear and anger as well....Fear for the future. If nobody does anything then what is our future going to look like?

A rock and a hard place

I23

Yes, socialism is still necessary but at the present moment if there is no real socialist possibility we might have to bite the bullet and become involved in reform activities which we have very little hope in. That's the present tragic dilemma of the Left and of the world.

Vision

I24

I think that the communist movement in the early part of the twentieth century did have a vision, I'm not sure that it was the right vision, but they had a vision. They did believe that somehow or other they were going to take over the state and institute a social society. I think that was the wrong vision but it was a vision, and one of the things that you find from reading some of the historical stuff is that they saw themselves as separate from the system, they saw themselves as outside the system, they saw themselves as creating a new society. The history and practice of state control as it got exercised in the Soviet Union and [elsewhere] shows that at least [that] way of achieving that vision proved to be wrong, but at least they had a vision. The problem today is that we don't have a vision outside of the system.